PARTNERS

Knowing the strong and successful career of Alfredo De Stéfano, have no doubt that this interesting photographic project, documentary and editorial, will provide an opportunity to enrich our vision and perception of the world and from ourselves through his particular object of research and study as is the desert.

We hope more companies and institutions committed to social and cultural development of the world, join this art project that undoubtedly will make us reflect upon our perception of space, emptiness and our relationship with the environment.

All the deserts are my desert. The desert opens
itself in front of me in its complex austerity. It is a potent witness
of the time that has written its history on rocks and boulders, now
converted to dust. The silent space dances in front of me in its
immense luminosity. It holds me within its invisible arms and
submerges me in its depths followed by my two eyes and my camera. The
desert exerts on me an inexplicable influx, forcing me to return to it
over and over, with the tenacity of one that peels off the onion,
layer by layer, amidst a teary and happy astonishment. I see its
itinerant dunes, its pilgrim hills, its valleys with its fragile
crests rocking in its whims, and I ask myself why, if I know it so
well, if I understand its entrails, if I read it as the sailor reads
the celestial vault; why does it still bewitch me?

Under the influx of its mystery I have conceived photographic
projects; and upon their conclusion I always remain with the intimate
conviction of having hardly touched the border of the miracle…. which
pushes me to initiate a new one, with greater intensity and at the
same time, with the intimate hope that this time its full mystery, its
magic enigma, will reveal itself to me.

In this new series of my photographic work, I propose to analyze
the various manifestations of life and death in the desert; what is
the cosmogony that sustains its mysteries, which are the similarities
and differences that generate their diverse cultures,

from the Goby in China, the Sahara in Africa, or the Western
deserts in Australia, all the way to the Mojave in the United States
or the Atacama in Chile.

I intent to represent these stories of life and death through the
interventions practiced on the vast scenery of the desert, in order to
dialogue with my own concept of life and death. Not any longer is
death conceived as the tragic ending of the existence, or the extreme
and painful fear that our Western Culture has taught us to escape
from, but as the epilogue antipode equivalent and necessary of birth.
I believe there is no better place to ponder about death other than
the desert, that inexhaustible vital horizon, dynamic, and vigorous; a
horizon in perpetual renewal.

I want to get close to the sacrament of living in and dying for the
desert. I want to determine my answers to these questions, only to be
ready for the next questions that will come, I know, the first and
only concern that I have always asked myself is: Where is this storm
of light going to?